Boris johnson

This morning, my son, who’s 17, was turned away from our local church. The designated spaces for people attending mass were full. He tried to book online at the church down the road – they were full too (and last week they turned my daughter away). It was too late to make an online booking for the lunchtime mass at the London Oratory, but the reservations system for the tea-time mass was still open, so he’s booked that, on a system that hilariously resembles the booking system for a commercial theatre, except that it concludes, which they don’t, with God Bless You. I say this not to expose my failings

When Boris ran to become leader of the Conservative party – and again when he campaigned in December’s general election – he was pitched by his supporters as a unifier. Boris was going to get Brexit done and then lead the country into a new era – the spats of the previous half a decade consigned to history’s dustbin. Unfortunately for Boris and indeed everyone else in Britain, that’s not the way things have worked out. Right from the start, Johnson’s premiership has been marked by conflict. Only a few weeks in, he removed the whip from a host of Tory MPs, including the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip

Chris Whitty made clear at tonight’s press conference with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor that he doesn’t think that the tier three restrictions are enough to get on top of the virus in the worst hit places. He was explicit that local councils will need to go even further in terms of closures in some places. Later in the press conference he said that the government ‘knew full lockdown works’ but it was also aware of the societal and economic harm it does, and the government rightly wants to keep schools open. Taken together, the answers strongly implied that Whitty thinks that in Covid hotspots everything apart from schools

The centrepiece of Boris Johnson’s speech to Tory party conference this year was his Damascene conversion to the merits of wind farms. Some people used to sneer and say wind power wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding, he said — referring, of course, to himself, writing in 2013. Now, his post-Covid plan for Britain is wind farms powering every home by the end of the decade. But the Prime Minister was right first time. When he was dismissing wind power, it was eye-wateringly expensive and was forecast to stay that way for the foreseeable future. No one envisaged, then, how global competition and technology would force prices down.

Boris Johnson likes a big announcement. Back in his days as London mayor, he told us he was going to build a new airport on an island in the Thames estuary and a tree-lined ‘garden bridge’ further upstream. Although not as hare-brained as his more recent plan to build a bridge to Ireland, neither of these schemes ever came to anything. Much of the government’s announcement today of a major green spending spree gives the impression of having been conjured up with the same lack of any serious intent, ‘smart cities’ being an obvious example. However, some of it looks positively alarming. Take home insulation, for example. It sounds so

Cineworld is to close its 128 cinemas – saying that the Covid restrictions have made its business “unviable”. It’s terrible to see that word applied to the cinema industry – and even worse to think of the 5,500 jobs this will impact. But the truth is that many businesses can’t survive what will be a year’s worth of restrictions – based on PM’s timeline where he’s talking about some kind of scientific breakthrough by Easter. The final straw for Cineworld was the delay of the new 007 film No Time to Die, now due out next April on the logic that this would maximise takings.  But how many cinemas will still be around then to show this

Home More than a quarter of the population of the United Kingdom (three-fifths of the Welsh, a third of the Scots and two-thirds of those in northern England) were put under harsher coronavirus restrictions. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, amid a flurry of local lockdowns, found himself unable to state the coronavirus restrictions suddenly imposed on the north-east. He said ‘six in a home, six in hospitality’ could meet, though the law said that members of different households could not meet at all indoors. Universal laws, brought in by statutory instruments, prohibited eating or drinking in bars, restaurants or clubs after 10 p.m. In cities such as York and Liverpool,

Paul Dacre, the former editor of the Daily Mail, has reportedly been asked by the Prime Minister to chair the broadcasting regulator Ofcom. This is the same Paul Dacre who, when put in charge of the Press Complaints Commission, Boris Johnson compared to ‘putting the Boston Strangler in charge of the code of practice for door-to-door salesmen’. The same Paul Dacre who, when Boris Johnson was elected Tory leader, said that ‘the party of family values has chosen as leader a man of whom to say he has the morals of an alley cat would be to libel the feline species’. To Mr Steerpike, this doesn’t seem like the best